A Ghost Story - Mark Twain

 

A Ghost Story - Mark Twain

Mark Twain Introduction

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".

 

A Ghost Story Theme

Twain's ghost story begins like many other ghost stories: His narrator is alone in a dark room and he hears and sees odd phenomena that he begins to suspect are supernatural. While he does actually encounter a ghost, Twain uses this particular ghost to mock superstition and expose greed.

 

A Ghost Story Summary 1

The short story begins when the narrator rents a room in New York City, in “a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years”. He sits by the fire awhile and then goes to bed. He wakes in terror to discover that the bed covers are being slowly pulled toward his feet. After an unnerving tug-of-war with the sheets, he finally hears footsteps retreat.

He convinces himself the experience was nothing more than a dream, but when he gets up and lights a lamp, he sees an enormous giant’s like footprint in the ashes near the hearth. He goes back to bed, terrified, and the haunting continues throughout the night with voices, footsteps, rattling chains, and other ghostly demonstrations.

 

Eventually, he sees that he is being haunted by the Cardiff Giant, whom he considers harmless, and all his fear dissipates. The giant proves himself to be clumsy, breaking furniture every time he sits down, and the narrator chastises him for it.

 

The giant explains that he has been haunting the building, hoping to convince someone to bury his body — currently in the museum across the street — so he can get some rest. But the ghost has been duped into haunting the wrong body. The body across the street is Barnum's fake, and the ghost leaves, deeply embarrassed.

 

A Ghost Story Summary 2

A musician lives with his wife in a small house in Dallas, Texas. They lead a happy life together, and are looking for a new home and planning their move. She tells him that before she moves away from a place, she likes to hide a note for herself there, in case she ever returns. They occasionally hear strange noises in the house; one night they hear a loud bang in their living room, which contains a piano which came with the house. They cannot find the source of the noise.

The next morning, the husband is killed in a car accident in front of their house. At the hospital, his wife views his body before covering it with a sheet. The man awakens as a ghost, still covered in the sheet, and wanders through the hospital, invisible to others. A door of light opens before him, but he makes no attempt to approach it, and it closes. He walks home and watches his wife grieve. Through the window, he sees another sheet-covered ghost inside the house next door; the two ghosts wave to one another.

One night the wife arrives home with a man, whom she kisses. The ghost hurls books from the shelf and turns lights on and off. The wife later listens to a song written by her (dead) husband. She eventually decides to move out. Before she leaves, she writes a short note and hides it in a gap in a wall. The ghost picks at the gap but cannot retrieve the note.

A family moves into the house. The ghost watches them eat dinner, play the piano, and celebrate Christmas. He becomes more and more agitated, and the children sense and become upset by his presence. One night the ghost gets upset after seeing a framed photo of the happy family on the piano and knocks it down, then starts hurling plates and glasses from the kitchen cabinet in anger. The family moves away. The second ghost continues to wait next door.

At a party thrown by the next occupants, a hipster explains the premise of the film, positing that remnants of the past, such as Beethoven's symphonies, will linger in the collective human memory long past the collapse of civilization. The man then describes the Big Crunch theory, which concludes that the entire universe will eventually collapse back into a singularity. The partygoers notice the lights flickering.

The house is eventually abandoned and becomes derelict. The ghost finally manages to slide the note out of the wall, but just as he does, bulldozers level the house, along with the house next door. As they look at each other atop the rubble of their former homes, the second ghost realizes and remarks "they're not coming back" and suddenly vanishes from under its sheet, which crumples to the ground.

The man's ghost watches as a skyscraper is built where his house stood. He walks through the building under construction, which is eventually completed as an office building. He then goes out onto the roof, seeing a futuristic cityscape. The ghost jumps from the ledge and falls.

The ghost is then standing in an empty field, where a family of settlers is staking out a claim on which to build a house. He watches the family's young daughter, who is humming the song he wrote. She writes a note and hides it under a rock. The settler family is then shown dead after an attack by Native Americans, and the ghost watches as the daughter's corpse decays and the field grows over it.

Finally, the ghost is inside the house again, watching as his living self and his wife see it for the first time. The husband asks the realtor about the piano, which she says has "always been here." As the ghost continues watching the couple, he sees tension in the marriage, and the husband resisting the idea of moving out. The night before his death, he tells his wife that he is ready to move. The ghost sits at the piano and strikes the keys, causing the noise that startled them at the beginning. Later, as the wife moves out, the ghost sees his earlier self (now a ghost also, but unaware of the other's presence) watching her leave. He goes to retrieve the note from the wall as before, and this time manages to reach it. Upon opening and reading the note, the ghost's sheet crumples and he vanishes.